Are Africans lazy or Americans crazy?

There is a fisherman in a small coastal town in Mozambique. Every morning he wakes up early and goes fishing. After he catches three large fish he goes to the market and sells two of them, and uses that money to buy the things his family will need that day. The third fish he keeps for his family to eat. It doesn’t matter that there are more fish in the ocean, and that he could probably sell more if he wanted to. The point is that he doesn’t need to. After selling the two fish, he goes home and takes a nap.

There is a businessman in urban America. He works twelve hours a day at a stressful job with a complicated title that no one understands. He doesn’t remember which of his children play which sports, and he has no idea what subjects they like at school. He talks to his wife in person for ten minutes a day. He buys iPads and giant TVs and expensive clothes and luxury cars and other things he doesn’t need to make his family think that they’re happy and have a good life.

Malawi

Malawi!!

I had an amazing trip to Malawi last week! I went with three other volunteers, one of which is dating a rather wealthy Portuguese/Mozambican who has a car. The first night there we went to the lake and stayed at a really nice resort, which the wealthy boyfriend had arranged, but turned out to be more expensive than he had thought, so we were planning on leaving the next day. Coincidently, there was a video/camera crew coming the day after to make some videos/brochures promoting tourism in Malawi, and the owners of the resort needed some people to model and be interviewed. So they gave us a great deal: 75% off lodging and food, and FREE water activities, as long as they could take pictures/video us. We accepted!

First water activity: snorkeling. Lake Malawi is full of an endemic fish called the Cichlid, and other types of fish. Snorkeling tip: take a piece of bread with you, and tons of fish will come super close to eat out of your hand. Second water activity: sunset yacht cruise. They have a yacht called Mufasa, and the first night we were there was cloud-free, so we went out on the lake the see the sun set from the water. It was so beautiful, and free champagne was included! Mufasa has two bathrooms, a full kitchen with a fully stocked bar, and sleeps 10 people. Third water activity: kayaking. There’s an island not too far off the shore, so we kayaked our way there and back. Fourth water activity: water skiing. They have a “training bar” to teach people how to water ski. It stick off the side of the boat so you can practice first before going out on the rope. I successfully learned, and realized that water skiing is a lot more tiring than difficult. Fifth water activity: sailing acrobatics. I didn’t know really what I was getting myself into when they asked me to do this, but it was awesome! First, I got all suited up in a wet suit with these water-shoe boots. Then they gave me a giant diaper-looking harness to put on around my waist/legs, and we were off to the sailboat. There I attached a hook on the boat to my harness, which meant that I could lean out over the water as we sailed along. What with the wet suit and flying over the water, I kind of felt like a super hero off on a mission. We later decided that my super hero name would be “Flying Bass,” and that my mission, for example, could be that there’s another sailboat that was having problems, and I had to fly out there to give them supplies/help, and then we elaborated even more that there could be a baby on the other sailboat that I had to go save. We presented this idea to the owners, to make this movie and have it be part of the video, but for unstated reasons they opted not to take advantage of our brilliant creativity.

In addition to water activities, they also had various games, including Scrabble, a pool table, and a trampoline! I’m happy to report that I still know how to do flips. The room had hot showers, fluffy pillows, warm comforters (it was winter there, and it got cold at night), hair dryers, full-length mirrors, and were so clean. And the food! Beautifully arranged fruit plates, bacon, pancakes, yogurt, jasmine tea, burritos, chicken, avocado, chick peas, pasta, three-course dinners with chocolate cake, lemon pie, fish cakes, yum yum yum!! And we got along really well with the owners and the other staff there, they all gave us hugs goodbye when we left. I’m now considering the idea of working at a resort in Brasil next year, or in Argentina or Chile.

After we left the lake, we wanted to go to an animal reserve, but, as often happens in Africa, there was an unforeseen complication: Malawi ran out of gas. About a month or two ago, the Malawian president kicked out the British ambassador, who promptly withdrew all funding from Britain to Malawi (which was about 20% of the national budget) and cancelled Malawi’s foreign exchange, thus Malawi ran out of money (all public workers haven’t been paid since), and couldn’t buy gas. We waited in line for almost 5 hours trying to get gas the day we wanted to leave, but could manage to. The next day the boyfriend was able to get just enough gas for us to make it to the border, but I think he ended up paying the equivalent of about $15/gallon. (Just to give you an idea how much that actually is in Africa, my Peace Corps stipend comes down to about $7.50/day.) The five hours spent waiting in line for gas was supposed to be spent going in to Blantyre, the largest city in the south, to get some souvenirs, which we were unfortunately not able to do. But, despite not seeing the reserve and not getting souvenirs, we had a great trip!

I must say though, that hearing the Malawians speak English makes me very worried about the quality of my Portuguese. It was very difficult to understand many of them, and I seriously hope that Mozambican Portuguese is much more similar to Portugal’s than Malawian English is to Britain’s. We did find out that apparently in Malawi, much schooling is done in the national Bantu language, and not so much in English, so hopefully that’s why.

And about the video/pictures, I’m not sure if they’re online for general viewing or what, but if I find out I’ll post the site.

Anecdotes

The unit I’m currently on with my students is about drugs and alcohol. I wrote a text about the effects of drinking, and I mentioned that many countries prohibit selling alcohol to people under a certain age. In Mozambique, the drinking age is technically 18, but that is not enforced at all, and parents often send 10-year-olds to go buy them alcohol. The students thought it was hilarious that in the US you have to show your ID to buy alcoholic beverages. But what if you forget it? But what if you don’t have an ID? But what if you’re already really drunk and you can’t go to the store yourself, what do you mean you can’t send your kids? They thought I was lying when I said that a store will deny selling you alcohol if you don’t have an ID.

In a past unit at school, the topic was literature. I decided to teach the students about limericks and similes. It was a big hit! I gave them the assignment to write similes, and here are some of the best ones I got:
I’m black like charcoal. I’m black like the blackboard. He is bad like Bin Laden. Sambo is strong like David Beckham. (suck up!) Eduardo is smart like a computer. (written by Eduardo, a slightly egotistical student) He was as short as a chicken. This boy is as polite as Jesus.

Sambo has a really adorable neighbor who is about 2 years old. The other day his mom bought him his first pair of shoes, and it was hilarious to watch this kid try to walk in shoes for the first time in his life. Barefoot he walks normally, but with shoes he would pick his left foot up really high, and then drag the right foot. And he looked at his feet the entire time. I think he was having trouble balancing because of the toes being enclosed or something. It made me think of the servant in the movie “The Birdcage.”

In the US we often hear of the terrible working conditions and low wages in Malaysia and elsewhere. I’m sorry to report that I participate in the exploitation of poverty to get cheap labor. I have a guy here that I pay to wash clothes, wash dishes, cart water, and do various other tasks. On average, he probably spends about 1-1.5 hours working for me per day, so let’s say 40 hours per month. Each month I pay him 400 meticals, which means that he makes 10 meticals per hour, which is about 30cents per hour, and $13 per month. He has a wife and 4 kids.

Description: Houses

Most houses in Mozambique are made of local materials. In the north, a typical house is made of mud blocks with a thatched roof. To get the blocks, you dig a hole next to where you want to build a house to get your mud. This way you don’t have to transport the blocks, and you have a nice trash pit for when the house is finished. You mix the mud with a little bit of water and put it in rectangular (brick-shaped) molds to form the blocks. Then you let the blocks sit in the sun for a few days. To construct your house, you dig a small trench about 8 inches deep for the foundation, including the outer and inner walls. To lay the blocks, you start at the corners and work your way out, making a sort of step-pyramid at each corner that grows with each additional layer of blocks. To hold the blocks together mud is used. Sticks and string are also used in this process to guarantee that the walls are being built straight, both horizontally and vertically. When you want to leave space for windows or doors, you can put bamboos across the top to support the blocks above the space.
A typical house is about 15 feet wide and 30 feet long, in my estimation. It will include the main living room, two bedrooms, and a dispensary, which can be used as a kitchen, or another bedroom. Each of these four rooms will be based in one of the corners of the house. (The cooking is done outside, and meals are usually eaten outside as well.) It will usually have two doors, each exactly in the middle of the 30-foot walls, positioned such that if both are left open you can see directly through the house. If the house is made with just one door, you may not later knock out blocks to make a second door. If you do, someone in your family will die. It will have either three or four windows, all on the 30-foot walls. The 15-foot walls never have windows. An average house of this type will have about 7 people living in it.
Roofs are angled in the typical manner that one might imagine, with sloping sides that peak in the middle of the 15-foot walls. To make the roof, you first lay a tight grid of bamboos. Then, if you can afford it, (which most people can), you use rolls of what resembles trash-bag plastic or a very flimsy tarp to cover the bamboos. On top of that, you put roof thatch, which looks pretty much like straw, or like dried reed-grasses. Then, so the thatch doesn’t blow away, you cover it with a widespread grid of bamboos. The peak is reinforced with extra plastic and thatch. The roof hangs about a meter in front of and behind the 30-foot walls, creating small verandas in front and in back. You will rotate your cooking/sitting spot around the house, depending on the time of day and positioning of the sun so that you are always in the shade.
Pretty much anyone here knows how to make a house. If you’re really poor, you will make your own, maybe with the help of some neighbors. If you’re not so poor, you can pay someone to make it. If you don’t have much else going on in your life, you can make the blocks in about 5 days, construct the house in about 6 days, and get the roof done in about 2 days, if the supplies are ready. All in all, a house can be made, from start to finish, in about 2 weeks. Most people don’t do it that fast because they have to go to their farms and do other stuff, but if you hire someone to do it, it can be really quick.
In the south, houses are often made of sturdy reed bases, with woven/braided banana or coconut tree leaves as the roofs. The bases will have vertical wooden posts periodically, which support horizontal bamboos, which hold the reeds in place. I imagine that the roofs are made in a similar fashion to roofs in the north, with bamboos and plastic, but I’m not sure.
I was going to leave the bathroom out, but I just decided to include it. Your bathroom will be separate from your house. First, you dig a very deep, but not too wide, hole. Then you put boards across most of the opening, leaving a 6 x 6 inch square uncovered. This is the hole where you will do your business. The boards are then covered with mud. This area is enclosed by roof thatch walls, using bamboos to hold them in place. The bathroom is roofless (I still can’t figure out why, it would be cheap, easy, and convenient for it to be covered, but no one does it!), which makes it very cold to take a bath in the wind, even with heated water, and very inconvenient to have to relieve yourself when it’s raining. A cloth can be used to close the doorway.

Greeting Children

The school is about a mile from my house. To get there, I take a path that cuts through my neighborhood. About 30 seconds into my walk the first kid sees me. “Good morning!!” he or she shouts to me. I respond. The kids in the next house hear and come to the path to yell good morning, which alerts the kids in the following house that I’m coming, who then come to greet me, which signals to the kids in the house after that to come out, and so on and so forth. All in all, there are about 3-4 solid minutes of greeting kids as a walk through my neighborhood. The main road that goes to the school doesn’t have many houses, so the only greetings there are with the people who pass going the other way, but seeing as how those people change every day the greetings aren’t as enthusiastic.
Now most young kids in Nacaroa don’t know how to speak Portuguese, or they know how to say certain phrases, but don’t know exactly what each one means. Therefore, common greetings with these children go as follows:

Me: Good morning!
Kid: Good morning!
Me: How are you?
Kid: How are you?
Me: I’m fine.
Kid: I’m fine.

Kid: Good morning!
Me: Good morning!
Kid: Good afternoon!
Me: Good MORNING!

Kid: Good morning!
Me: Good morning!
Kid: How are you?
Me: I’m fine!
Kid: Good morning!
Me: Good morning...again!

Sometimes we greet in Macua, but I think the kids (and their parents) enjoy it more when they greet me in Portuguese. And once isn’t enough! When I come across a group of them they all should “good morning” together. I respond. But they don’t know which one the response was for, so they all keep shouting “good morning, good morning” repeatedly as I walk by. The kids on the way to the school are used to seeing me every day and get excited to come greet me. Kids who I come across in random places have various reactions. Some hide behind the other people they’re with. Others cry. Others wait until I’ve passed, and then yell good morning after me. Others respond normally, but then giggle excitedly with their friends once I’ve passed. Others yell “good morning,” but then run away and hide without waiting for a response. Others just stop and stare at me.

Quality vs. Quantity

Quality vs. Quantity
Quality and quantity are enemies. Where there is quantity, quality is often not important, and rarely achieved. Where there is quality, quantity suffers. But how do you balance this inverse relationship to get what’s best for everyone? If you focus on quality, what will change if you increase quantity by 1%? Probably nothing. What about 5%? 20%? 50%? How do you draw the line between doing what’s best and what looks best?
Let’s look at schools in Mozambique. They say that completing 7th grade is mandatory (but in reality it’s no more mandatory that having a driver’s license to drive) which makes putting caps on class size difficult. An average primary school classes has about 50-80 students. Even with optimal resources, well-trained teachers, and involved parents, getting a good, quality education would be difficult. Now change that to minimal resources, minimally trained and minimally dedicated teachers, and illiterate and uninterested parents, and what do you get? Students who enter secondary school (8th grade) without knowing how to read, write, understand or speak Portuguese very well. Students who can memorize that A=B and B=C, but can’t deduce that A=C. Students who complete 10th grade without being able to locate their own country on a map of eastern Africa. Students who need to use a calculator to do 3x7.
So my question is this: is it better to have 80 students who kind of know a little bit about a few subjects, or 40 students who know a fair amount about most subjects, and 40 kids who are illiterate? Because, in my opinion, if the lower achieving 50% of the students just got kicked out of school, the remaining 50% would be able to learn a fair amount. The “humanitarian” has to answer that all children have the right to education, and that all 80 students have the right to go to school. But what if realizing this right for the lower achieving 50% jeopardizes the education of the higher achieving 50%? What if, in the higher achieving 50%, there exist students who would be capable or learning how to be engineers, doctors, and various other professions that Mozambique imports from China and South Africa, at the benefit of these other countries? But these students never have the opportunity to show what they’re capable of.
In my opinion, from what I’ve seen here, Mozambique would have a better future sooner if all kids didn’t have the right to education. I know it sounds awful, but it’s true. At a public school here, it’s nearly impossible to get a quality education, and rare to get even a decent education. Example: I give tests that have 20 multiple choice questions, each question having 4 options. In two of my classes I asked the students what grade they would statistically get if they randomly guessed for every question. Out of approximately 70 12th-graders, exactly one knew that the answer was 5. If that’s half-way through 12th grade, imagine what all they don’t know after 7th grade. Is Mozambique educating its citizens to be able to lead and develop the country in the future? Will it always have to hire people from other countries to do things that are too advanced for them to do themselves? Will it always depend on foreign aid to fund all aspects of its functioning?
I know I sound pessimistic, but I’m also being realistic: Mozambique does not currently have the resources and infrastructure to give every child a quality education. Yes, we can say that they should work on building more schools and training more teachers. With what money? And what about right now? I know as a democratic American I’m supposed to say, “but even if the child can learn one thing that will help them in their lives, then it’s worth it for them to go to school.” Fine. If there were enough schools and teachers I would be 100% for that. But given the conditions that actually exist, is it worth it for one child to learn one useful thing while robbing another child of learning five useful things?

Giving Birth

Giving birth is a battle. Sometimes there’s a cry and a sigh. The result of the birth being a tie in which mother and child win life. Other times there’s a cry and silence, the child killing the mother and taking her soul as a trophy. Or there’s a sigh and silence, the mother killing the child, but preserving her own life. And finally, there’s total silence, the result of the birth being a tie in which mother and child kill one another in the fury of the battle.

From Paulina Chiziane’s “O Alegre Canto da Perdiz” (The Happy Song of the Partridge)